


Girls' Night

by SegaBarrett



Category: Firefly
Genre: Bonding, Fluff, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 06:33:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5775292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaylee and Inara try to shed the roles they've built for themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Girls' Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedibuttercup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Firefly, and I make no money from this.

“Do you ever get bored?” 

Inara looked up from the screen she’d been staring at for the last ten minutes. She had heard Kaylee’s question, that much was true, but she didn’t know exactly how to answer it. So she did what she had been trained to do – she stalled for time to find an acceptable answer. A simple “What?” wouldn’t do it, of course, and she hated going back and forth with each person having to repeat themselves. It was inauthentic.

And so she asked, “Bored with the ship?”

Kaylee leaned back and propped herself up on her elbows.

“With us.”

“Why would I get bored? I can travel wherever I would like, and then I get to come back to the ship… to spend time with all of you.”

“All of us? Or do you just mean Mal? I mean, after all, you two fight like an old married couple half the time.”

Inara rolled her eyes.

“Were I married to Malcolm Reynolds, I think I would have purposely had myself left behind on some planet or another… Trying to predict him from one moment to the next is exhausting enough as… a friend.”

“A friend,” Kaylee mused.

Inara grinned. Her cheeks were blushing slightly.

“You see why I don’t get bored on this ship? There’s always something happening, something exciting and death-defying.” 

“Yeah, I’d have to agree with that,” Kaylee told her. “But I have to say that… I like… I mean… It’s nice to have moments when you’re not being chased by people who want to kill you. Like the time you did my hair. That was really nice, until the Captain broke it up and all.”

“Mal has a way of ruining the moment unlike anyone I’ve ever known.”

“I think he’s busy for a while, though. Heard something about Badger. So we could hang out,” Kaylee said enthusiastically. “We could… I mean we could… I don’t know.”

“Maybe you could show me some of the work you’ve done on the ship. Or, well, tell me about it,” Inara said, gesturing to her expensive outfit. “It may get a bit messy.”

“You know I always want to, but if we’re in this fancy shuttle... We should take the chance to do something fancy.”

“Like… dress in fancy dresses? Or drink fancy drinks? Or…?” Inara asked. She felt her heart leap – she loved Kaylee’s innocent interest in everything around her, and especially in her. 

“Both of those sound good, actually. What’s fancy?”

Inara reached back and played with her hair, tossing it over her shoulder while she considered her options.

“Why don’t you take a look around? It’s all kind of… well, I know this shuttle inside out and backwards. I’m not really sure what might be interesting to someone else.”

Inara wasn’t sure why she was suddenly unsure – she had made an entire career out of being self-assured and always knowing what to do and who to project herself as at any moment. Then it hit her like a ton of bricks – she was trying to impress Kaylee.

Not in a sexual sense. That was something she did well at; after all, she had all the training in the world. 

But this was something like being a girl again and meeting someone so interesting that you worry they would never like you, and finding out they like you anyway, and then being at a loss for what to do about it.  
This was all the sleepovers Inara had gone to as an awkward twelve-year-old and felt out of place at. She hadn’t been born with all her curves and valleys and perfect poise; she had been a too-tall, gawky thing that had bumps and spikes in all the wrong places and none of the right ones.

She’d been a girl without a friend in the world, once upon a time.

Sometimes she saw a bit of that in Kaylee; she seemed more at home amongst the cogs and twists of the engines than she did in a conversation – she was sweet and kind on a ship full of people who didn’t always consider that to be an asset. 

Inara, on the other hand, had plenty of conversation skills, but felt like she was grasping for depth half the time. She could sit there drinking tea with someone for hours and press themselves against one another, share intimacies, but was she really getting to their core self? How many people showed that to anyone at all, ever? The universe had only gotten bigger and lonelier over the years.

Kaylee began to walk around, to sniff the air. 

“It’d be so nice to be here all the time. It’s so fancy. I see why you’re always trying to keep everybody else out.”

“Is that how I seem?” Inara asked with a smile. “Closed off?”

“No, not exactly…” Kaylee stammered. “I just meant that you’re different. But not in a bad way. Just in a… in a way.”

“In a way,” Inara repeated. She supposed she could see what Kaylee was trying to say – after all, a companion was meant to be different, to be better in some way. That didn’t mean she had to always like it, though. “Listen, maybe for tonight, let’s leave that alone. Maybe let me just be… I don’t know. Me.” She wasn’t sure exactly who that was anymore. “Let’s just be Inara and Kaylee, not the companion and the mechanic.”

Kaylee leaned against the wall of the shuttle.

“I’d like that. It’s been a while since I haven’t been Kaylee the Mechanic. I don’t know if Just-Plain-Kaylee is much fun, though.”

Inara draped one foot over the other.

Sleepovers, she thought again.

“You’ve got to meet Awkward Inara, then.”

Kaylee laughed and extended her hand.

“Well, I’m, uh, pleased to make your acquaintance, I guess?”

Inara let out a content hum.

“We’ll find out. You may not be so pleased in a couple of hours.”

Kaylee brushed back a lock of her hair. 

“Try me.”


End file.
